ChatGPT Is Magic, and Sometimes Still Confused
Open.ai released ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) a few days ago. Based upon GPT 3.5 machine learning technology and honing its craft using pre-2022 data, it is a chatbot. It is an amazing chatbot. It remembers what you said earlier in the conversation, and even can get snarky about it: “As I mentioned earlier,”.
The ChatGPT applications and examples have been astonishing: from simple Q&A, to creating datasets, generating software, writing essays, and so much more. Twitter user @datachaz does a great job providing examples.
Some have compared the release to the first detonation of a nuclear bomb. Yet, most people haven’t realized it went off. Surely the folks at Google have taken notice.
ChatGPT is only a prototype and has some limitations. For example, it can not look up things on the internet. It is limited to pre-2022 data - mostly.
After being dazzled by its magic, I was however surprised it initially struggled with the following question.
What’s the largest Spanish speaking country?
The largest Spanish-speaking country is Mexico. It has a total area of about 1.9 million square kilometers …
That struck me as odd. Surely Argentina is bigger.
What Spanish speaking country is the largest in square kilometers?
In terms of square kilometers, the largest Spanish-speaking country is Argentina. It has a total area of about 2.8 million square kilometers, making it the eighth largest country in the world. …
I thought so. How can it be this wrong on a basic wikipedia style question?
It became obvious that ChatGPT struggled with the nuance related to “largest”. Is it referring to the population or geographic size?
Later in the day, the answer to my first question had evolved, and now referred to the population.
What’s the largest Spanish speaking country?
The largest Spanish-speaking country is Mexico. It has a population of more than 126 million people and is the 11th most populous country in the world. Spain, the country where Spanish originated, is the second largest Spanish-speaking country. It has a population of around 47 million people.
That makes sense now.
Still, I can tell it continues to struggle.
What Spanish speaking country is the largest in square kilometers?
In terms of square kilometers, the largest Spanish-speaking country is Argentina. It has a total area of about 2.8 million square kilometers, making it the eighth largest country in the world. Spain is the second largest Spanish-speaking country in terms of square kilometers, with a total area of about 505,000 square kilometers. Mexico is the third largest, with an area of about 1.9 million square kilometers.
Spain is not the second largest Spanish-speaking country in terms of square kilometers. Yet it is so in terms of population.
Lastly, after I pulled up your jaw from the floor, I wonder what it takes to create and run this system. I haven’t found much about it thus far. Yet, it is an important factor to consider when thinking about the real near term impact to Silicon Valley.
I had learned that lesson from Andy Bechtolsheim. We were in an auditorium on the Santa Clara Sun campus, and had just listened to the technological advances network accelerator cards provided. Then uber-nerd Andy took the floor and walked us through the calculation about the economic feasibility: the cost of a processor, the cost of a network accelerator card, the price of the server, etc. It quickly became clear that while the technology was amazing, that the price point made those expensive network accelerator cards only worthwhile for very nice applications, and not worth adding by default to a Sun server.
It seems like Google is wondering the same here.
